Real Estate Marketing Vendors Trashing Other Vendors

For the past two years, I have been exhibiting at various “Tech Savvy” real estate conferences and at national real estate agent franchise shows. I have made many friends. Some of these friends are my direct competitors in the real estate website design market. There exists an “esprit de corps” among the vendors, consultants and trainers at these shows.

During these shows and with the phone calls I receive at my office during the week, I will have prospects ask me how we compare to other companies. Sometimes there is no comparison because the agents are not comparing apples to apples. As a web design and marketing company that integrates third party IDX’s, you cannot compare us to an IDX company that offers inferior containers even though we can integrate any third party IDX into our WordPress web sites. That said, I never have a bad word to say about any of my competitors, I have never trashed another vendor. I have never slammed another vendor even when they offer an inferior product. My integrity and the integrity of the company I work for is everything to me.

In January of this year while attending a national real estate marketing conference, it was brought to my attention there was a cheap web design company that had a comparisons page on their site comparing their cheap sites to other, more established companies in this business. The comparison they made to us we full of intentional misrepresentations. How our product functionality and costs were represented was filled with errors. Numbers were twisted for their own benefit. We asked them to correct this misrepresentation and they have not corrected it. I guess it is time to lawyer up.

Then recently, a vendor we have done business with in the past, published a blog post from a testimonial an old client of ours stating that this new vendor was producing much better results then our company. The twist is that the client was actually unhappy with the third party IDX we integrated into our site, yet the posted letter put 100% of their dissatisfaction on our company. This post was a malicious dig at our company and lacked integrity.

You will notice I am not mentioning company names. I will not, as I don’t trash other companies, even malicious offenders. Secondly, with the popularity of my blog and the success our company has had, my mention of their names will bring them additional internet exposure.

So I guess my statement to them would be the following:

“Thank you for choosing our company to misrepresent and trash. Obviously if you are going to play this way, you must recognize us a major player in the real estate marketing and web design industry. And the fact you have to resort to intentionally attacking another vendor, shows me your product or service is not strong enough to stand on its own.” – CJ